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Litmus, a company that tracks and tests email campaigns has taken a close look at where people are viewing their email. The stats, at least according to Litmus, provide some interesting insights into email habits. Outlook is still king, Webmail is in sharp decline, and Google Chrome is gaining share very rapidly.

The comparison is from July 2010 to July 2011. According to Litmus, use of mobile devices to read email is cutting into Webmail severely. Opens in mobile devices have jumped from 7% to 15% in one year. Desktop opens dropped from 55% to 53%, and Webmail dropped from 38% to 32%.

Is there anyone among us that like org charts? Do I see any hands? Bueller?

Maybe they are a necessarily evil. Maybe they are these artifacts that are instantly obsolete; once drawn they clarify how wrong-headed an organization's structure is and are therefore can have some curative powers. Maybe they are good for those among us that like hierarchies and definitive reporting relationships, and who start to shiver at the words "dotted line reporting." Or maybe it is just fun to see whom reports to whom and how other companies are so messed up.

Sheldon Laube has been around tech for decades, holding executive positions at leading consulting firms and working most notably at Price Waterhouse Coopers these last few years as chief innovation officer. I caught up with him this week and recorded a short podcast interview that you listen to here.

I spoke with him about his thoughts about collaboration and social media and how things have changed over the decades with these tools.

It's called "Developer Preview" for a reason: Microsoft wants professional developers to be the first to see its design motif for Windows 8, and the first to start giving feedback before the rest of the world jumps in. Perhaps fortunately, perhaps unfortunately for Microsoft, I also attended the Build 2011 conference here this week

I was a beta tester during an era when companies paid for the service. My testing philosophy is for me to jump in without full knowledge of what I'm doing, which some say for me comes naturally. This week, Microsoft loaned me and other members of the press the developer preview tablet that paid attendees have received to take home. Some say a picture is worth a thousand words; with me, it's worth 20,000. I've made some pictures of my experiences, and I think you'll agree with both me and CEO Steve Ballmer that there's a lot of work to be done.

In a word, no. We may be reaching the point where the desktop OS is no longer important, eclipsed by the developments of the browser and ironically a victim of better integration by Microsoft and others.

Yet we are all huddling around the news feeds coming out of Build 2011 as we try to figure out what Microsoft is attempting with Windows 8 and Metro. My prediction is that this will become the OS/2 of the modern era: an OS that is so elegant but instantly obsolete by events, designed for the wrong chip (the mobile ARM CPUs) and based on a cellphone design ethos that no one could care less about. Yeah, but it has a great new set of APIs!

(Photo @ Creative Commons by kerplunk kerplunk)

If you are trying to implement a content caching solution on your enterprise network, you know that serving up dynamic content is a cat-and-mouse game. The major Web content delivery sites want to deliver fresh content, and you want to try to cache that content, so that subsequent views of it don't consume additional network bandwidth on your Internet links.

But what you probably didn't know is how often these sites change their delivery mechanisms, making it hard for any caching to be effective.

You can see the changes when you walk down the departure gates at the airport. The Apple logos are everywhere. At the recharging stations, at least half of the notebook computers are MacBooks. And if you can see everyone's phones, you'll notice this: Most iPhone users have a Mac. Every Mac user has an iPhone. Those who have neither probably have an iPad.

The PC era is not dead any more than the refrigerator era is dead. But as long as it does not mean anything to proudly display a Windows logo, Windows itself is endangered.

The news this week about firing Carol Bartz, Yahoo's CEO, made us go into the Wayback Machine to recall the many good things that Yahoo has created over its life. While there are many that are lining up to take shots at the Yahoos (certainly justified, including this mention of Bartz here), there are still some things worth noting that came out of Yahoo or that were touched by the company.

Tech CEOs are getting a lot of attention lately. With the exception of exiting Apple CEO Steve Jobs, the attention is not a good thing. From Carol Bartz's abrupt firing to Andrew Mason's IPO-icing shenanigans, many tech CEOs don't seem to be earning a janitor's salary – much less the inflated compensation they're getting.

So I decided to take a look around and see, who are the worst CEOs in tech? I limited the selection to those CEOs currently (or very near currently) working. So that means that some of the worst tech CEOs in history (see, for instance, SCO's Darl McBride) aren't on the list.

It's often said that business leaders make their companies in their own image. In that case, no two images ever stood in starker contrast with one another than the Hewlett-Packard of former CEO Mark Hurd, and the Hewlett-Packard of present CEO Léo Apotheker. Whether for better or worse, HP is becoming a different company than the one many enterprise clients signed their contracts with just a few years ago.

That fact has led one Forrester analyst to recommend this to his firm's clients: not that they dump HP, but that they make a careful re-assessment of their business relationship with the firm, taking into consideration whether a contingency plan for switching vendors might be in order.